


Not from this World

by Sylla_Headhunter



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Altean Lance (Voltron), And another promise for a wip, DAY 13!!, Galran Prince Keith (Voltron), Keitor Month 2020, M/M, Role Reversal, We have the power of Satan and Keitor on our side, bc this one got OUT OF HAND, slow start to something epic hopefully
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:42:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22245790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylla_Headhunter/pseuds/Sylla_Headhunter
Summary: Day 13: Role SwapAllura’s eyes shone with barely contained glee and enthusiasm – she was almost skipping along the way, glued to one of the walls for one second, falling over her feet to crouch down and examine something depicted on the ground in the next. It was honestly exhausting enough trying to keep up with her movements and Lotor had not the faintest idea how she managed to be so chipper after a giant wormhole had kidnapped all of them while riding a Blue Lion, out of everything his head could have come up with.A blue, glowing lion that was somehow very much alive, according to Allura who had evidently “talked” to it.Or: Lotor gets thrown into space with his friends (he would like to refer to them as "acquaintances", thank you very much) and discovers his sexuality at the sight of one very purple, very sexy Galra Prince
Relationships: Keith/Lotor (Voltron)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 94
Collections: Keitor Month 2020





	Not from this World

**Author's Note:**

> Me: How do I even do Role Swap??  
> Also me: somehow manages to whip up 3k while also putting this on the list of her evergrowing pile of wips
> 
> how the fuck
> 
> Anyways, this was my attempt at "Role Swap"! It feels like I cut it off too abruptly, but I just couldn't manage any more on this day. This one, however, is one I will definitely write for once this is over (and maybe once I actually manage to complete one of my other projects?? Or possibly two?? Or ALL OF THEM - just kidding, that's never going to happen) because partly human!Lotor makes me very happy (and so does Galra Prince Keith. Hmmmmmm)
> 
> //Also, why the hell does this thing have so many characters?? How is a girl supposed to keep up?? Is this why people like to split a group of characters every chance they get? I bet it is//

“What the hell is this place?!”  
Zethrid’s voice boomed through the empty hallways, making her girlfriend Ezor almost jump out of her skin.

“Jesus, Zeth! Do you actually _want_ me to die a horrible death?! Because I can just flop down and let you trample me to the ground if _that’s_ what’s going on!”  
Lotor sighed, not wishing for the first time that he had just simply left all of them behind; well, maybe apart from Axca, who was really doing nothing wrong, being the quietest of them all as of now.

As for the fifth member of the ir group …

“Look at that! Oh, this is absolutely _fascinating,_ I wonder how old it is??”  
Allura’s eyes shone with barely contained glee and enthusiasm – she was almost skipping along the way, glued to one of the walls for one second, falling over her feet to crouch down and examine something depicted on the ground in the next. It was honestly exhausting enough trying to keep up with her movements and Lotor had not the faintest idea how she managed to be so chipper after a giant wormhole had kidnapped all of them while riding a Blue Lion, out of everything his head could have come up with.

A blue,  _glowing_ lion that was somehow very much alive, according to Allura who had evidently “talked” to it.  _Her,_ as she emphasized every chance she got.

He still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t just a fever dream with him falling asleep in the library of the Garrison  while studying for another of Professor Sendak’s infamous tests.

“There is so much up here! Do you think E.T. is real, too?” Ezor grinned, hopping over a small crack in the ground. Zethrid snorted.

“Sure, we’re riding into the sky on a blue lion but you want to find a scrap-bot.”  
“Hey! Do not squander my cute baby, Zeth!”  
Another deep sigh ripped out of Lotor before he could stop himself. “It’s _slander,_ Ezor, not _squander._ Please don’t use this method of space travel as an excuse to lose your ability to use the english tongue.”

E zor giggled and stuck her tongue out to him.

“Shove it, Prince Lotor. We can’t all be born with the Oxford Dictionary crammed up our-”  
“Alright, that’s enough,” Axca shot back without looking at any of them. “Stop squabbling like sea gulls and concentrate on the fact that we have no idea where we are.”  
He would have kissed her, had he not known about her sexuality (and the fact that they were friends and absolutely nothing more).

“Thank you, Axca.”  
“I meant you too, Lotor.”  
Gratefulness turned sour.

“Fine.”  
“Good.”  
“Fantastic!” a new voice piped up, and Lotor froze, almost running into Axca in the process. His friend glared into the darkness ahead of them, trying to light it on fire with her lamp.

“Who’s there?!” she yelled into the empty space with her “I swear to god if you ate the last piece of chocolate, I will eat _you_ ” - voice. Silence followed and Lotor was about to start relaxing again, when-

“Shouldn’t I ask that question? You’re the ones breaking into my house, not the other way around!”  
A slender shadow crossed their field of vision and Lotor grabbed for the keys to his machine, ready to brandish them as a makeshift weapon if push came to shove.

I t didn’t. His sanity just quietly collapsed in on itself at the sight of a young man with dark brown skin, glowing marks on his cheekbones and pointy ears sauntered towards them, hands curled around a sword as casual as if it were an umbrella. It was a rather beautiful weapon but a weapon nonetheless, the man himself dressed in a charming combination of richly decorated clothes and roughly patched rags of a gray uniform.

“So? Who the quiznack are you guys and what are you doing in this castle?” the guy demanded once more, as none of them answered anything, all of them caught up in their own variation of shock. Or so Lotor thought.

“Are those _real_?!”  
Allura’s hand shot towards the young man’s ears and Lotor gripped her wrist hard enough to make her whine in protest. “Jesus, Lotor! Be a bit more gentle to your female friends, alright? I’m not doing anything, I just want to _look_!”  
Female friends, sure. Allura could probably bench press all of them without breaking a sweat, she wasn’t allowed to pull the “females are inherently weaker”-card any more.

“I apologize,” was the only thing he voiced however, letting go of his … acquaintance’s wrist. “I do think that we ought to be polite at least and _not_ try to touch someone else’s ears.”  
“I wasn’t about to touch them!”  
“Oh, she can touch them all she wants, I don’t mind!”  
Lotor blinked towards the young man positively beaming at all of them (Axca heaved a long-suffering sigh next to him, and honestly, he couldn’t blame her).

“Excuse me?” he tried. The young man shrugged, grinning from ear to ear. He had slightly more pronounced canines, further alienating his appearance.

“She can touch them all she wants,” he repeated, mischief clearly sparkling in his eyes. “I don’t mind. Yes, they are real and honestly, how can you all live with those roundishly stupid globs anyways?”  
He pointed at Allura’s head in response, making her blush underneath her dark skin. Ezor snickered softly.

“He’s funny, can we keep him?”  
“No.” Axca’s voice mingled with his and he shared an exasperated look with his friend. What was he getting himself into here?  
“We can’t just _keep_ a person, Ezor,” Axca continued, ignoring Ezor’s sounds of protest. “Do you want me to throw you out of this place?”  
“Touch her and you’ll regret it.”  
“Axca, Ezor, Zethrid. Please.” Lotor felt a headache beginning to pound against his skull and massaged the bridge of his nose with two slender fingers. “Stop that.”  
He turned around to face the man once more who was watching them all with a bemused smile playing on his face.

“I apologize. Yet again. This castle is an extraordinary piece of work and we are all very taken with it – it might have had a negative impact on our manners.”  
The man blinked before shrugging. “I don’t mind. What are you all, though? I’ve never seen anything like you before!”  
This was exactly the kind of question he had wanted to avoid. They knew nothing about this place or its dangers (and political situation, not to mention various dangers along the way) which made them an easy target for potential threats; a threat like the man in front of them could be.

“We are not from this place,” he tried. The young man snorted.

“I would not have guessed that. Which planet are you from?”  
 _Planet._

So he had been right and this wasn’t the only location in space inhabited by intelligent life forms. Well … mostly intelligent. He leveled the young man with another cautious look, only breaking eye contact to glance at Axca. His friend had adopted a rather leisure pose but he knew better – Axca could pounce like a small but vicious predator from that stance. She blinked once and Lotor nodded slightly.

“We are from a planet called Earth.”  
He had expected and tried to prepare for a lot of reactions – the man attacking them all of a sudden, him retreating into an icy shell of barely veiled aggression or (faked) ignorance. He was not prepared for him to start _laughing._

“You’re from ‘Dirt’? Seriously? I mean, I didn’t expect you to actually tell me, from how cautious you’re being but that’s the name you decided to come up with? Amazing.”  
Lotor watched him in stunned silence. Just what is this guy talking about?  
“I didn’t say ‘Dirt’. Our planet’s name is ‘Earth’,” he finally repeated. The man blinked.

“Oh, you were serious about that? Wow.” He snorted undignified and sheathed his sword – or rather, it _vanished_ into thin air. Ezor gasped audibly at that.

“How did you do that?!” she exclaimed, only her girlfriend holding her back from rushing at the man like a mother cat her kitten. “It just _vanished_! Is this Star Wars, _please_ tell me it is!”  
“Ezor-!”  
“Well, the stars are _sort of_ having a war, I guess? Not in the sense that actual balls of gas are pummeling each other to death but their people are being killed, does that count?”  
It’s not just his words that made all of them freeze but rather his tone as well, lightheartedness masking the steel hiding beneath. Steel forged on quietly simmering fury and a resentment Lotor can practically taste like venom dust coating the air.

“People are being killed?”

Axca’s voice, as silent as it usually was, broke the spell around them. The man nods, face shifting into a serious expression for once. He looks almost subdued, nodding towards one of the giant gashes tearing the ground in two.

“You see that? That was _their_ doing. The Galra’s.”  
Lotor waited for another explanation but he didn’t get one, the other man just looking at him rather expectantly.

“Galra?” he finally indulged his growing curiosity. “Is that all to your story?”  
“Is that….? You’ve _never_ heard of the Galra, are you serious? Big, burly people? Purple fur? Evil soldiers for an empire over 10,000 years old?”  
“Wait, wait, wait!” Allura’s voice cut through theirs razor-sharp, her eyes for once hardened flint. Lotor turned towards her and the other man (the alien, Lotor thought with a soft shudder running down his spine, because that was obviously what he was) inclined his head.

“Yes?” he drawled. Allura shot him her best withering glance she’d probably picked up from Axca.

“’Galra’, wasn’t it? Did they ever get near Kerberos?”  
 _Kerberos._

The name made all of them twitch, except the man staring at Allura as if she had grown a second head. One of the reasons they were actually here – Allura being desperate after her Uncle’s crash landing, her assuring everyone time and time again that Coran wouldn’t make such a rookie’s mistake. Her pursuing the case with everything she had until Lotor had found her, crying voicelessly over a picture in one of the classrooms. She had been near a mental breakdown, honestly, the poor thing and Lotor, for all his problems he had with her, hadn’t been able to just leave her like that.

Things had escalated, to say the least.

“Kerberos?” the man echoed. “Of course they _know_ of Kerberos, they have an outpost just around the corner, universe-wise spoken. Why, does your lump of Dirt know about Kerberos, too?”  
Allura’s breath hitched and Axca, standing nearest, placed one hand on her elbow to give it a light squeeze.

“My uncle was sent on a mission to Kerberos,” Allura whispered and Lotor saw the mask drop from the young man’s face in an instant.

“I understand,” he muttered quietly, before blinking once. “Wait, if Kerberos is the furthest you little monkeys ever got, how come you’re _here,_ at the Castle of Lions?”  
“We rode a giant blue lion,” Ezor replied, her voice almost forcefully cheerful. No matter how tactless she could be, a missing uncle wasn’t something she’d carelessly joke about. Her rainbow-coloured braid seemed rather dull all of a sudden.

The other man, however, stared at her with eyes so big they seemed to swallow his entire face, before a grin split the part that was still left of it.

“Say that again,” he demanded. Ezor blinked.

“We rode a giant blue lion,” she indulged him and the man let out a loud whoop. Its echo bounced around the empty walls almost like a war cry.

“You found it! I can’t believe it! Oh, this is _fantastic,_ Keith is going to go insane!”  
He made a grabbing notion towards Lotor, who instinctively pulled back.

“What are you doing?” he demanded rather harshly, but none of that seemed to matter to the man anymore.

“Come on!” he urged all of them with a laugh. “I need to introduce you all to someone – he _needs_ to hear this, this is going to reverse his sense of gravity so hard.”  
His hand actually closed around Lotor’s wrist this time and Lotor felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise to match his confusion – and his temper.

“We are not going to follow you into this castle any further, not until you tell us exactly what is going on!” His voice was sharp and the man seemed to really look at him for the first time since their meeting, his former careless gaze calculating – until he breezed an easy enough laugh and shrugged.

“I’m Lance and you’re standing on the ruins of my home planet. Nice to meet you! Can we _go_ now?”  
“Ruins of your-?!”  
“ _Go now!”_

Something clattered across the floor and Lotor finally managed to jerk his hand back, heart pounding. Next to him, Axca had assumed her fighting stance, eyes fixed on to the darkness just beyond “Lance”.

“What was that,” she hissed soundlessly. Lotor shrugged softly – he had no idea. He saw, however, how Lance’s eyes widened, his shoulders tensing. Axca didn’t miss the way his body language changed either, foot nudging the man’s.

“Explain.”  
Lance swallowed audibly. “We’re not alone,” he mouthed, followed by another word they hadn’t known until recently but which nonetheless sparked fear within them.

“Galra.”  
Zethrid more or less flung Ezor over her shoulder, ready to bolt, and Lotor tried to think of any strategy that might prove useful to them, anything at all – but they were (almost) all of them human and had no idea what they had gotten themselves into. This was a rather hopeless endeavor and he could only hope to get the other ones (or himself, a quiet voice whispered inside his skull) to safety before it was too late. Back to the Lion, maybe? Should he change it-!  
“Lance? What are you doing here, it’s been three doboshes already. You cannot possibly walk down one hallway _that long_.”  
The voice felt like a gust of hot wind against his bare face, sand gradually wearing down on his skin until he got reduced to nothing but bone and _heat_ sizzling quietly into his ears. Axca growled, her hand closing around a piece of metal she had crammed into her belt before they had been whisked away by a Blue Lion.

“A Galra awfully familiar with you,” she hissed at Lance, whose skin seemed to have lost all its color.

“I swear, I don’t know anything about him! He’s unfamiliar, not my friend-”  
 _“Lance!”  
_ The voice cut him off rather sharply but Lotor, as tense as he was, couldn’t sense hostility in it; just some sort of exasperation he felt pretty familiar with. A shadow moved across his field of vision and another man stepped out of the darker shades of black surrounding him like they were made to be his armor.

He was beautiful and even that word didn’t do him justice. His tall frame towered over almost all of them (Zethrid being possibly the only exception to that) and yet he seemed lithe, agile on his feet like a wild cat ready to pounce on its prey. His skin (smooth, not as furry as he had imagined a Galra to be, if he was being honest) shone a soft purple, akin to a grape being held under direct sunlight, and his eyes seemed to mirror the color, violet blending into gray, the sclera an almost shocking yellow.

He also looked very much annoyed, one of his eyebrows rising higher for every second Lance refused to look at him, his purple hand straying to the hilt of a sword strapped to his hip.

“What’s the meaning of this, _Lance?”_ he purred and Lotor swallowed something down he couldn’t exactly place – a feeling he was very much unfamiliar with. Lance, on the other hand, dropped his frightened mask in a heartbeat, another face-splitting grin growing on his lips.

“Keith! Glad to see you, I thought I’d lost you forever. This castle is HUGE, you wouldn’t believe it!”  
“Oh, I do.”   
“Keith” seemed entirely unimpressed by Lance’s antics, his eyes leaving the dark man to stray towards Lotor and his acquaintances. Lotor felt himself tense under the scrutinizing glance, a weight pressing down on his shoulders he had no idea of how to interpret.

“And who is that?”

Lotor felt his lips about to move, about to answer this man, no matter what he asked, until Axca tugged sharply at his elbow.

“We’re no one,” she told the purple man (the Galra, Lotor realized strangely befuddled) in an icy voice. “And it’s none of your business, anyways. We’re leaving.”  
“On Voltron?” Lance cut her off before she could turn around and fulfill her promise. Keith’s eyes widened for the fraction of a second.

“Lance?” Truly fascinating how a simple name could sound like the promise to a rather inconveniencing death. “What are you talking about now?”  
Lance grinned. “Did I get your attention, Mister Purple?”  
“You have my will to push you into a black hole. What was that about Voltron?” Keith prompted the other man again, his eyes never leaving Lotor’s … or, well, probably their group.

“They arrived in the Blue Lion, that’s what’s about Voltron,” Lance chirped, and Lotor saw those blank features slip for the second time in a row. There was something sparking to life in those gray eyes – something Lotor couldn’t place entirely. It made the man in front of them so much more human that it actually startled him.

“The Blue Lion … this is brilliant. I will forgive you for your continuing antics just this once, Lance.”  
And Keith smiled, a small, reserved thing barely alive but Lotor felt his heart skip a beat.

“Follow me.”  
Axca tried to cuss him out (at least that was what her sharp intake of breath sounded like) but Lotor gripped her arm almost too tightly, his eyes finally straying from the Galra’s face towards his oldest friend.

“Don’t,” he mouthed towards her, shaking his head ever so slightly. She stared into his eyes, a challenge evident in her own before she lowered her head just a fraction, allowing him to win this fight of wills just this once.

“Fine. We’ll follow,” she grumbled softly. The small smile on Keith’s lips turned feral.

“I am honored to have you following my command,” he said rather sarcastically, before turning around and walking down the dark hallway, feet not making the slightest sound.

Accompanying him feels like it is expected of all of them and for once, none of them can resist. Lotor takes a step towards the man already vanishing into the shadows once more and can’t help but swallow nervously.

He felt like his whole life was about to undergo a most violent change – and he didn’t really mind it all that much.


End file.
